Re: Referring to revisions in the git future.

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> as useless as SHA1s would be.  The overhead of pulling just to get the
> commit under discussion swamps any difference in convenience as far as
> I'm concerned.  YMMV, of course, that's just me.

I largely agree, and for that reason I basically never use revnos in
discussions.  I find dates to work much better: humans can relate to
them very well, and since you'll have to add your own contextual info
(which branch is under discussion) and then go through a tool if you
need/want to get more details, you might as well use dates.
FWIW, I find this same argument makes me prefer dates over revids.

> For example, in response to my earlier post, Stefan responded that
> SHA1s aren't that easy to recognize and you'll get too many false
> positives.  My initial rebuttal was "Eh?!", but a more constructive
> response is, so we establish a convention of prefixing with "sha:" or
> "SHA:".

I'd rather go with "git:", but yes that's also the first obvious answer
that came to my mind.

> The issue of "which repo" (especially for ELPA) is real, too, but
> again context is likely to give you a very good first guess, and after
> that you can configure some kind of variable to improve
> Emacs's guessing.

I guess that could work, but it requires a bit more setup than I like.

Especially since Git doesn't support shared repositories very well, so
I'll probably have to live with multiple Git repositories (compared to
the single Bzr repository I use now shared between 4-6 lightweight
checkouts).  This in turn means that the "auto-handle git revids" tool
would have to try all of those repositories.

And if I don't place the repositories for the various projects where
I care about revids at the same place on every host, then sharing
that config-setup work between those various hosts doesn't work as well.

> This ain't rocket science, and it's the kind of thing Emacsen are
> *very* good at.

Kind of.  The thing is, in 99% of the cases, the main thing I want to
know from a "revision identifier" is the rough age of that revision
(this is useful info because if it's very recent, then I can probably
guess exactly which commit this is referring to).  For that "date" is
the best description there is.


        Stefan